Expert power in project management

Planning Considerations For The HR Project

At this point, you’ve organized your HR project team and you are familiar with the importance of leading and managing the project and team. It is now time to plan your project, which happens to be a large and critical part of project management. Project planning tends to be collaborative and integrative in that many factors, such as scope, resourcing, budgeting, and risk need to be considered.

Write a five to six (5-6) page paper in which you:

Define and discuss scope and scheduling as they each relate to project management and provide a “Statement of Importance” to your project team so they know the relevance of each task.
Review the behavioral skills associated with project resourcing listed in the textbook at Section 9.1. and select any four (4) of the skills you consider more critical. Be sure to explain why.
Explain to the management team and your project team how you have determined the budget associated with project costs. How are costs aggregated? How would you explain determining cash flow for separate activities? Be specific with your responses.
Discuss at least three (3) ways the project manager is able to identify possible project risks.
Go to https://research.strayer.edu to locate at least three (3) quality academic (peer-reviewed) resources in this assignment.
Your assignment must:

Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.
The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

Identify the scope of projects and the structure of the accompanying work.
Plan the project schedule and resources.
Estimate project costs and associated risks associated with each cost.
Use technology and information resources to research issues in managing human resource projects.
Write clearly and concisely about managing human resource projects using proper writing mechanics.

Running Head: Leading and Managing HR Project

7

Leading and Managing HR Project

Leading and Managing HR Project

Introduction

Effective leadership is all about communicating effectively. While hiring a manager, good communication skill is a primary component to put into consideration. Helping a manager to make sure that persuasion, responsibility, creativity, and management of value system as well as providing support and motivation to teams. They should have the power to inspire and convince teams to work extra hard to achieve the targeted goals of the organization. Made possible by effective leading. Sound planning, monitoring and communicating. Effective communication acts as an added advantage for a leader to lead effectively (Armstrong & Michael, 2016). The question, what are the key points managers must keep vividly in their minds while communicating with their teams and suggestions to improve communication to make leadership more effective is a topic of discussion in every organization. Thus, forms the basis of our discussion.

Effective and accurate communication act as an essential factor to grow an efficient and successful leader or manager. To accomplish professional success, managers must be active and convincing communicators. It is very vital for managers and his team to learn how to communicate effectively and to aid in successfully completing projects and enable the organization to achieve success and grow. As if that is not enough, communication allows every employee to share what they have and give their opinions. Good communication yields better understanding and trust among people, empower them to follow core principles and values that their leaders want to inculcate in them (Armstrong & Michael, 2016). Lack or absence of excellent communication leads to failure to reach goals and the overall decline of the organization. Interacting with the team freely, a manager will increase the potential of having the work done in time. Good leaders are always aware that effective communication is obtained through just a single process. It is through listening and speaking that managers are said to have good communication. Managers should hence set aside objective that they must achieve after communicating.

Review and understand the types of project manager power listed and defined in the textbook and select and define any two you feel would be relevant to your current project and explain why. Be specific

There are five types of project power manager; formal or legitimate power, reward power, punishment power, expert power, and relational power. One can have all these powers, but to complete the project, I will need to have at least four of them (Heldman & Kim, 2018). Since am doing my final project on leading and managing the Human Resource project, I will consider expert and reward powers. Formal power will help me to establish my own authority as the lead of the project, while expert power will help me gain trust and support for my decisions from team members. With expert power, team members will respect me and trust my decisions. Nonetheless, this trust may not translate into motivation; it can only contribute to hygienic factor but cannot be a motivating factor. A raise in performance and efficiency is not obtained without having a motivating factor. A willing team member will work hard for better results, and encouragement to do work comes from reward power. Group members will be more energetic to commit themselves if as a manager, I will reward their performance. In summary, it is important to understand all types of power that a project manager can practice in various situations and different types of organizations. This is mainly because, styles of management are dependent on situation and nature of organization one is working with. Most preferable, punishment and reward powers are more suitable for projected organization although, expert power is also needed.

Identify and briefly discuss a minimum of four outcomes resulting from managing projects and address how you might resolve the issues. Be clear with your rationale.

Most organizations have gone through projects that did not end on time (Thomas & Gary, 2017). There are several pitfalls that can sink projects. Here we are going to focus on four main reasons that cause projects to fail.

A common reason why most projects fail is lack of visibility to all projects. As a project manager, we often lack visibility which resources should work. Many at times, managers in various departments share team members. Thus, they might not know the actual resources that are working on days. Project managers frequently mix schedules and plans at the outset of the main project. Also, managers are at times occupied with managing issues, to re-organize resources; they lack enough time to update these tasks on schedule and review their effects. To overcome this issue, a combination of tools, process, and people-based changes must be implemented. Tools mean having a team with a central location; process inspires team members to update their work in a central system. An easy solution is to post project files in a network folder, and team members should only get access to them.

Unclear project objectives is another challenge. A couple of organizations have opportunities and project initiatives than their potential to achieve. Project managers are more often given many projects to manage yet they cannot realistically achieve. Lack of vision and sound leadership from the top management to project managers have a negative impact on their projects. A solution to this is always to consult project managers when weighing these initiatives. They should preferably use the available resources and embark on projects with the highest priority levels.

Following lack of project, prioritization is usually overloaded resources. Project managers see executive management as not having an idea on the amount of workload they always assign to them. There are, however, many ways to uncover the resource that is working on them and on what occasions. The simplest way is to adhere to whiteboard with a daily-based grid that shows the kind of task undertaken by your team.

Lastly, another common issue is communication. Most team members communicate with the project manager via emails, and this has proven to be less effective. The majority will respond to the manager directly instead of all team members. Thus, leading to miscommunication, or some members will not access some information. A solution to this is to have a centralized communication to resolve questions and issues pertaining to projects and tasks. May include clarifying scope, goals and other decisions related to the on-going projects.

Discuss some increased challenges a project manager may face when leading virtual or global project teams. Recommend a few strategies to deal with the challenges.

Managing a virtual team requires managers to focus on the fundamental of good management, including, setting clear goals, proper communication and general teamwork (Gilson, et al., 2015) .

The first and main challenge is communication. This factor is vital in any workplace. Miscommunication always arises when there is the use of the inappropriate method to communicate, for instance, the use of emails. The best solution is to choose the proper tools. Technology makes a virtual team possible and easy to handle. You can create a web and video conferencing like zoom, workflow automation like Microsoft flow.

The second pitfall is trust. Trust is vital in any relationship. When employees trust their managers and work towards a shared vision, collaboration and engagement will occur automatically. There are several ways to overcome this issue. These include establishing a mission statement, inspire collaboration and team building, and establishment of a common goal.

Finally, productivity is among the increased challenges faced by the project manager when handling a virtual team. Low productivity is risky when employees work outside the main office. Employees may fail to use their time wisely. Ensuring accountability, the formation of positive structures and developing processes to follow up every day are among the solutions to this problem.

Identify and explain your overall plan for communication management during the project. The plan must be comprehensive and at a minimum address: structure, purpose, method, and timing.

A communication management plan refers to a policy-driven approach that is used to facilitate communication with stakeholders. Communication plan plays a significant role in change management, it battens visibility of the project and its status, raises the productivity of team meetings, and ensure the project proceeds to align with its goal (Kerzner & Harold, 2017). There are four main steps to follow when establishing a project communication plan as discussed below;

Choosing a communication method: it depends on how you will agree with the group members, whether to meet one in a week to discuss updates or the discussion board using emails is of satisfactory. As a project manager, you should think of how best you can bring your team members together and be in a loop while being productive. If your team members prefer being in touch through a phone call, you must build it in your plan because it is through it that you going to achieve the best results.

Defining the purpose: calling for too many meetings and sending unnecessary emails to members may make them do a shoddy job. Working under pressure will always give the worst results. Always learn to be purposeful in your communication plan and have in mind that any communication you include has a good reason.

Structure: a project communication plan must be structured. Several elements that must interact with each other should be included, and all information reaches all affected individuals. The elements contained in a communication plan are the identification of an audience, the structure of the message, a sample of a communication plan, objectives of communication plan and rules.

Timing: for successful communication, you need to plan and time your steps for better outcomes. Depending on your research and related resources, establish a solid timing strategy to execute the steps of your communication plan.

In conclusion, effective leadership and communication together give effective leadership communication. Communication makes a leader useful in developing a better understanding of teams. A project manager is faced with many challenges, and they should opt to look for solutions by approaching the top management and the employees as well.

References
Armstrong, & Michael. (2016). Armstrong's Handbook of management and leadership for HR: Developing effective people skillls for better leadership and management. Kogan Page Publishers.

Gilson, Lucy, Maynard, T., Nicole C, J. Y., Vartiainen, & Hakonen, M. (2015). Virtual teamsnresearch; 10 years, 10 themes, and 10n opportunities. Journal of management, 41(5), 1313-1337.

Heldman, & Kim. (2018). PMP: project management professional exam study guide. John Wiley & Sons.

Kerzner, & Harold. (2017). Project management: a system approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Thomas, & Gary. (2017). How to do your research project: A guide for students. Sage.

Jia-chen Chuo. Proceedings of the Multidisciplinary Academic Conference. 2018, p254-261. 8p. , Database: Academic Search Complete

Moodley, Dylon; Sutherland, Margie; Pretorius, Pieter. South African Journal of Economic & Management Sciences. 2016, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p103-117. 15p. DOI: 10.17159/2222-3436/2016/v19n1a7. , Database: Business Source Complete

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